How to make change initiatives work

Every organization you work and build will have to stay relevant to the customer you serve. Since customer priorities and pressures keep changing, you and the company also have to change. This is a very well accepted fact. All externally induced changes happen at a pace unimaginable. Be it is adherence to a new tax regime, changes in billing cycle or responding to market forces on pricing.But the same organization finds it hard to change from within. Why is it so difficult?

Proactive changes within a company are always triggered by a perceived notion of the near future. Most of these changes circle around organizational interfaces and its structure. It hardly touches the core of the company – the work and how the craft is built and delivered. Majority of the impact is only for people within the company – either their roles and/or reporting structure.

If you are part of the company for a long time, you might have seen several attempts of change initiatives. Over a period of time, you might have developed your own understanding of ‘why’ and ‘how’ of this change and also to maneuver through the same. But you also have a responsibility to make the change work.

A powerful way to do so starts with painting-the-picture-of-tomorrow – how the world around you will function, when change is fully implemented. If you visualize and articulate the future-state and the positive impact it brings to everyone, the possibilities of realizing the change increase multi-fold. Because everyone develops and keeps the picture-of-tomorrow in their gut. If their gut-feeling says it is not going to work, their system follows to make it real. Other-way is true as well. If the future is visualized well with how people contribute, live and work, their gut starts feeling it works. And the effort to make it work starts automatically. That picture starts acting as a director, a GPS to help navigate seamlessly. Just compare this to a virtual-reality walk-through of your new home before it is even drafted on paper. You start living in that much before it is actually complete. When you occupy the place, you feel fully at-home from day one.

When you believe how the future-state will look-like, you find your way to stay there and maneuver. Mostly, you start living in the future right-away and the results show-up in all actions. People around you will do the same as well. Surprisingly, the change would set-in, seamlessly.

Paint-the-picture-of-tomorrow as clearly and colorfully as possible. Display it where no-one can miss. Allow people to paint/ picture themselves in that canvas. When they start participating in completing the picture on the canvas, they are making the change happen!